Book detail: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This novel delves into the emotional journey of a young boy who grapples with his father's sudden death in the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Through his quest to understand the world and the legacy of his father, the story explores themes of grief, memory, and the human capacity to heal.
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“It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“The world is a big place," he said, "but so is the inside of an apartment!”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We spent our lives making livings.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“...people with nothing to declare carry the most.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Life is scarier than death.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“It is better to lose than never to have had.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad’s last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn’t come back”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I'd lost count of the disappointments.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“She saw through the shell of me into the center of me”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel